Best Practice for Give-Get Reporting

Emily Katz · February 3

Hi,

I am looking for advice as to how to set-up an easy to pull report that will show gifts given by relationships of board members, essentially satisfying a give/get. Does anyone know how to do that?

Thank you!

Carlene Johnson · February 3

@Maya Rosman tagging you in because you have a lot of experience with this if I am remembering correctly.

Karen Diener · February 4

You will not find an easy report in RE that will contain both of these metrics. You should be able to pull data from RE, but not in a single, pretty report without using another tool. It also depends on how you are coding this information.

The Give part should be easy. This would be any gift from your board member. You may or may not need to include soft credits and that's a big discussion of it's own.

The Get part is trickier. Ideally, the board member will be the solicitor/fundraiser on the gift from "the people they solicited" or who are "on their list". If the board member is a solicitor/fundraiser on the constituent record but not on the gift, it depends on how you have that information coded and which gifts "count" as part of the get. For instance, it is hard to pull a list of everyone assigned to Peter Parker and show all of their giving because Peter Parker might not get credit for every gift they made.

These can potentially be two separate queries and exports, but again, it depends on how your data is structured.

Maya Rosman · February 4

I can share what we do, but Blackbaud has changed how things work in webview, so this practice likely won't work going forward. I've pushed back against the new interpretations/stricter interpretations, but I am not confident of getting any traction. Ok, to give you specifics:

Our current practice is to set Board up as Fundraisers and to mark them as the Fundraiser getting credit for all gifts the gift and gifts they get. Board members are set up as a Board Solicitor on their own records and on their company's records. So if Jenny is on the board and gives a $3000 gift, she's marked as the Fundraiser for that gift. And if Jenny also helps us get a gift from her company of $2000, she is marked as one of the Fundraisers on that gift as well. Our Board give/get goal for each Board member is $5000, so that is coded into RE as well. Then I can use the Solicitor Performance Analysis standard report to track where board members are towards goal. I use a query to choose solicitors on the 3rd Tab of the report (my query is current board members).

This works beautifully and is super easy to accomplish. Before I run the report, I double check that Board members have been credited for all the gifts for their company during the time period.

HOWEVER, there are two big issues with this for Unified View.
1) Webview does not allow you to add a person as a fundraiser on their own gift. I've pushed back rather hard against this, as database view has no such restriction and we've used this data entry approach for over a decade. The powers that be have decided that Fundraising cannot include your own gifts and their reasoning seems pretty weak to me. I think they should let each institution track what they consider to "count" as fundraising for their own institutions. It doesn't hurt anyone to allow this flexibility.

2) The Solicitor Performance Analysis standard report does not currently exist in webview. I had missed this omission and because there's very little clarity on what standard reports are still planned, I don't know if we are just going to miss this incredibly helpful report going forward. I'll probably need to add an idea to the Idea Bank for this one, as it's a fantastic report that shows you total raised per Fundraiser and measures it against their goal.

If Blackbaud refuses to budge on #1, I'll probably continue to credit Board Members as Fundraisers for the gifts they "got", but will have to do a new separate calculation to include the gifts they give. It's a lot less elegant/streamlined, but it should be do-able. If we don't get the Solicitor Performance Analysis standard report in Unified View, I can pull the gifts they "got" into a query if I need to.

Carlene Johnson · February 4

To follow up on @Maya Rosman's comments, here are links to some ideas in the idea bank which folks might find helpful:

Ideas about the Solicitor Performace Analysis report to support: https://renxt.ideas.aha.io/ideas/RENXT-I-1890 https://renxt.ideas.aha.io/ideas/RENXT-I-9364

Allowing Fundraisers to be credited for their own giving: https://renxt.ideas.aha.io/ideas/RENXT-I-8314

Emily Katz · May 13

@Karen Diener @Maya Rosman Thank you so much for this!

One issue that I am having when creating a query with board members as solicitors, is that gifts that came in via DAF or soft credited to the donor they are assigned to are not pulling in my solicitor report. Thus we are missing gifts.

Is there a way to fix this or does every gift (not just constituent) need to be tied to a solicitor?

JoAnn Strommen · May 14

Reports pull using the solicitor credited on each specific gift. The gifts would also need to be credited to the solicitor that come via DAF.

Candi O'Hara · May 14

Thank you all for your comments to Give-Get Reporting, super helpful as we are looking to establish a similar metric. One speed-bump we are encountering is our organization prefers only the Development team to be Fundraisers. Without creating too much havoc around "how" gift credit is natively intended to work in RE, I'm trying to brainstorm alternate options (other than gift attribute/custom field) for board members to receive gift credit and their give-get metric.

I have suggested adding different Fundraiser Types to help distinguish between Development, Board Members, etc. All ideas are welcome, thank you in advance!

Candi O'Hara · May 14

@Emily Katz if helpful to you and DAF gifts, we hard/soft credit the donor/spouse then use a gift attribute to capture the name of the DAF account name.

JoAnn Strommen · May 14

@Candi O'Hara. I can understand a hesitancy to only want staff recorded as fundraisers. You can help to educate them that a different type keeps records clean.

This "Give-Get" type can be very limited - date from/date to, specific campaign/fund/appeal. It's truely the what was designed in RE to use. I've used it for small special groups and for large, for multiple years and a short time frame.

It would be my vote on the way to go. BB should bring this report over at some point as it's so useful.

Maya Rosman · May 29

So, I've learned a "fun" new thing. Apparently you cannot even add a Board Member as a Fundraiser in RE if they don't also have a user record. Webview forces you to link someone to their user record before you can be a Fundraiser. This is a catastrophic change to how we manage our Board Giving. I was making my peace with not being able to add them as Fundraisers on their own gifts (still sucks, but manageable), but not being able to add them as a Fundraiser at ALL is a huge problem. Many organizations make their Board Fundraisers, but do not give their Board members access to RE. We want to be able to record their fundraising credits in the most obvious way, but they do not need to get into RE to look anyone up or access the Fundraiser tools. They introduce us to prospects and work with us to get the yes! They advocate for giving to us in the companies they work for and get credit when those gifts arrive. I would HATE having to record this as a gift custom field. It's ugly and is a ton of extra work for our gift entry staff who currently don't have to remember to assign board members to gifts because board members are the Fundraisers assigned to their associated company's records!

I'm going to add an idea to the idea bank for this as well and I hope you all will vote for it and add your use cases.

Maya Rosman · May 29

Update - everyone please go vote for this Idea and add your use cases for why you need to continue to have non-user Fundraisers in Univited View: https://renxt.ideas.aha.io/ideas/RE7-I-6186

Maya Rosman · May 29

Unified View, not Uninvited View. Unintentionally funny typo.

Bill Connors · June 1

Thanks, Maya. This has been a problem for a while and will HAVE to be addressed by BB before db view goes away. Thanks for bringing more attention to it.

Best Practice for Give-Get Reporting

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